DICTIONARY OF SACRED IMAGES
- Category: Religions
- Author/Editor: Mircea Eliade
- Format: Essay/Paperback
- Dimension: 18 cms x 24,5 cms
- Pages: 198
- Price: 35 €
- Year: 2020
Review
The images are living rituals of re-actualization and initiation into the sacred time of Paradise that we have lost: with the symbol and the myth, the image belongs to the everlasting substance of the spiritual life. The images respond to the need of analyzing the Being, revealing its most secret ways. They belong to a humanity that precedes history and are the mark of this richer and more complete mythical existence. Eliade gives Jung the credit of having identified the spiritual value of the image: the spirit, as a nostalgia for primordial unity, uses images to understand the ultimate reality of things, since reality manifests itself in a contradictory way and it is impossible to express it through concepts. Sacred symbolisms and archaic mythologies survive and continue their work in the spontaneous flow of images that repeats and imitates them incessantly. The lemmas range from prehistory to ancient Mediterranean, Asian, pre-Columbian civilizations, extending to the great cultures and religions (Taoism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam).